Finders Keepers
by laurelnola
Summary: The Doctor argues with River over Clara's future; For everyone who hopes Clara's tenure as a companion doesn't end with goodbye, but with happily ever after in the one place the Doctor can't run. Companion Piece to "Dinner at the End of the Universe" and "Laws of Attraction"


**Finders Keepers**

12/Clara, 11/Clara, River Song

One-shot; Angst/Romance

Summary: The Doctor argues with River over Clara's future; For everyone who hopes Clara's tenure as a companion doesn't end with goodbye, but with happily ever after in the one place the Doctor can't run. Also a companion-piece to "Dinner at the End of the Universe".

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 **A/N: This is mostly my sappy wish to the show that Clara's eventual exit not end up as an elderly teacher who traveled (nice as that was) but was ultimately left behind by the Doctor in the end, like every other companion. Because those two are just too intimate, dammit, to just be like every other Doctor/companion, in my eyes. I always hoped there WAS a way she'd be able to leave (as I know she will) AND he'd get to keep her, which would explain so much (including a timey-wimey plot hole that's always bothered me), so….if you're handing out wishes, Santa Moffat, this one's mine.**

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"You know the time is coming," came the hated words, whispered into his ear. "There's a reason people say the past always catches up to you."

"Not to me," he replied brusquely to the ghost-ish form of River Song, perhaps a bit more sharply than he'd meant to do. He was already regretting bringing her out of the TARDIS databanks to ask her advice.

"It's a fixed point."

"I _know_ it's a fixed point," he shot back, this time not bothering to hide his frustration. And then, seeing her purse her lips at his stubbornness, his inner 10 year old rose to the surface. "Save your lectures, River. Out of everyone in this room, which one is the flesh and blood, 2,000 year old Time Lord?" he said, lifting his hand high in the air, and making a show of looking around the TARDIS control room. "Oh, right, that'd be me."

He dropped his hand and glowered at her, but River merely sighed, which only made his fists curl.

He waited for her to reply, but instead, knowing him as well as she did, he watched her, blonde curls bouncing as she moved seamlessly around the control panel, skimming the edge with her holographic palm until she reached the view screen. She blinked and suddenly on the screen an image of Clara met his eyes.

"You know you've already kept her longer than you were supposed to," River said softly.

The Doctor closed his eyes, unwilling to see, unwilling to face what he'd known was coming the second he'd regenerated into his current form, and had seen Clara's lovely eyes staring back at his.

 _My Clara_ , he thought automatically, and with it the thought that always shot through his brain whenever he saw her. _Mine._

 _Was yours_ , replied the level voice that always played back in his brain, _Will be yours_.

"For your information," he replied hotly whether to himself or to River he wasn't sure, "I ran with Amy and Rory for _ten years_."

"Yes, and look at how well that ended for them," she said, without a trace of malice, knowing how fragile he already was. Even so, he recoiled, not because she'd meant to hurt him, but because it was true.

"They had a happy life," he said, defiant.

"Because they had _each other_ ," River insisted. "Would you take that from Clara?"

"No! I…" the Doctor sputtered. "You know I…."

"I know the only man around her who didn't make you writhe with jealousy was that boy, that teacher at her school who looked just like you," River said, her eyes rolling. "Why do you think that was?"

"Because he didn't teach something useless like P.E.!" he said, bristling.

"Danny Pink taught maths."

The Doctor struggled to control his breathing. "Danny was never her future. She just didn't know it."

" _You_ know it, that's my point."

He turned away, from her voice, and the words that he didn't want to hear.

"You have to be ready," River said gently, finally placing a soft hand on his shoulder, one he could almost feel.

But the Doctor violently shrugged it off, as though her words, her presence, burned him.

"I _know_ that," he nearly spat, and couldn't help but admire the way she didn't even flinch, she who understood, even while it hurt her.

She watched him, as if waiting for his breathing to steady, before finally sighing again. "If it helps," she told him quietly, "It's not just a fixed point. It's what she'd want."

"You couldn't know that," the Doctor retorted, waving her away, angry at River at last. "Maybe Clara would be perfectly happy staying with me, growing old alongside _me_ …"

"Until you'd have to leave her when she's too old to run with you?" River asked calmly, stopping him in his tracks. "You'd only be forced to leave her if she stayed, Doctor," she pressed. "You know that. You couldn't put her in danger when she's too old to run."

"She was in danger back there, too!"

River took a deep breath and sighed. "But not the only danger that ever mattered to her- losing you."

The Doctor closed his eyes again, the pain of it gripping at the two hearts that beat frantically in his chest, frantic at the thought of losing Clara only to save his own past.

How could he bring himself to send her away, and worse, to send her into the arms of someone who still didn't understand the depths, magnificent and vast, of what she was.

How could he send her back to the bow-tie-wearing idiot he'd been?

How could he trust his younger self to understand how precious she was, how brave, how much his love for her had only grown deeper, his desire to protect her becoming even more maniacal, after he'd regenerated into a cantankerous old man that she still followed blindly to the edges of the universe. How could he give up the love of Clara Oswald, even after he'd already gotten it for her whole lifetime?

Because he was a greedy man and wanted more than his fair share, that was why. Because he was jealous of any man that breathed near her, including himself. That whirling boy he'd been didn't deserve her, didn't deserve the years of happiness with her that he was going to get, filling the Doctor's brain with memories of Clara, who had laid her head on his shoulder every night as they watched the sun rise and fall from the roof of their Tower in the village of Christmas, who'd fed him pink marshmallows even when her hands became so old and wrinkled that he'd had to help her, and whose grave had been dug by his own shaking hands, his tears falling on the grounds of Trenzalore as he'd wept.

"It's already happened for you," River said, breaking his reverie of the agony he'd felt, burying Clara, centuries before her younger self had come back to him in the future, clinging to the doorstep of the TARDIS.

The Doctor gripped the view-screen and flung it away, almost exactly as he'd done that very day Clara had returned to him on Trenzalore the first time, when he'd wanted to sweep her into his arms, to kiss her the way he'd done every day for the last six decades of her life, and had, instead, known he'd have to send her back, no matter the pain.

It had nearly killed him to send her back a second time. It hadn't mattered that she was a ghost, that she'd sat on the roof not far from where her own centuries-old grave was covered over with flowers, her bones turning to dust. All he'd been able to think was how she'd been real and alive, and he'd had to lean on his cane to keep from trembling at the sight of her, wanting her greedily, the way he'd done from the beginning to now. And now River was asking him to give her up once more?

"No!" he said, pounding his fist on the console. "I don't care! I promised her I would never send her away again, and this time, I'm _keeping_ that promise _." And I need her. I need her, River,_ he thought, and when he looked up, he knew she could see it in his eyes.

She stared at him a long while, then finally said, with all the gentleness and understanding he knew she could muster, "My love, you already had a lifetime with her."

"I want more," he said, nearly pleading.

River smiled. "Of course you do. You're the Doctor."

He dared himself to hope, for that one brief second, before River brought him back to reality, the way she always did. "But you're not a god, Doctor, no matter how often I may have called you one," she said, her lips curving into a half-smile. "That was just for pillow-talk."

His own smile fell, and she sighed, lifting a hand to his cheek. "You already had your life with her," she repeated. "After everything Clara's done for you, don't you think you owe her a life with you?"

He stilled at her words, remembering Clara, slightly bent with age, reaching up to brush the flopping hair out of his eyes as he'd hunched over the rusty metal head of a Cyberman, trying to revive him for the hundredth time.

 _"You'll get him working again," she'd said, planting a kiss on his temple. "You always do." He'd stopped for a moment, then grasped her aging hand, pressing it to his lips._

 _"Ah, well, it's not like he's going anywhere," he'd told her, then pulled her down into his lap, into his arms, the sound of her laughter washing over him._

 _Neither_ of them had been able to go anywhere, except towards each other, he remembered. They'd had to do what he once promised, to hold hands and not let go, despite his constant worry that the next attack would end them both. It was a worry that Clara had never seemed to share, and which had mystified him back then. But then, he'd never known more lives were coming, had thought that the end with Clara would be the final end.

He hadn't known that the universe was going to punish him once more for his sins, not by killing him, but by making him live without her, for centuries, maybe eons left to go. She'd both cursed him and saved him in asking for the Time Lords to let him live, because she'd doomed him to face this horrible choice, to save her future and his past by destroying his own hearts.

In all their years on Trenzalore, she'd carried the memories of his future, never revealing what was to come, despite the truth field. He thought of it with admiration, because he was nowhere near a truth field, and it killed him nearly every day to not be able to tell Clara that he wasn't her boyfriend, he was, in fact, _so much more_. He wanted to tell her every minute they were together of his memories of _her_ future, of how they'd lived out their lives on Trenzalore, that he'd watched her grow more beautiful and more beloved with every passing year, and that the happiness he'd had with her was so big that it almost crippled him now to think of it, knowing it was only part of his past.

He fought against one particular memory, the one that he knew would seal his fate, most of all. It was the way that Clara used to ask him, thousands of times over the course of their lives together, repeated so often it became almost a prayer:

 _"Do I ask you to be clever?"_

 _"No, Clara," he would reply, always grinning._

 _"Do I ask you to be just?"_

 _"Just yours," he would recite dutifully._

 _"What must you always be for me?"_

 _He'd straighten his bow-tie proudly, like the blind moron he'd been. "Just the Doctor."_

 _And she'd kiss him and whisper, "Don't forget. No matter what."_

He'd never understood it, because he'd been too busy waiting for the kiss that came at the end, to know she'd been preparing him for this, this terrible moment when he'd have to send her back. Because he must. Because it was a fixed point and without sending her back, the Time Lords never would have known how important Clara was to him, would never have blindly acceded to her demand that they impart a gift so unheard-of it was nearly a sacrilege- an entirely new regeneration cycle- and all to a rule-breaking renegade they scarcely trusted. They'd trusted _her_. And if Clara didn't go back, spend years earning their trust through a crack in the wall, his new regeneration cycle wouldn't happen and he wouldn't exist.

"That's not the reason," River said, reading his mind, as ever, and yanking him straight out of his thoughts. "I mean, saving you is a good reason, but that's not why she was glad to be on Trenzalore."

The Doctor looked up, his heavy eyebrows furrowed, as River continued. "You ridiculous man," she sighed. "Even now you still find it impossible to believe that you would be so loved that living on a dark, war-torn planet would be a paradise if it meant living out the rest of one's days with you."

He stared at her, open-mouthed. But even so, her words seem to release another cascade of memories, each one of Clara smiling at him, in the future she was destined to have on Trenzalore. She'd looked so happy, despite all the reasons she shouldn't have been. It had been hell broken loose, just as he'd once predicted to her. And yet, with Clara beside him it had also been heaven. Because without the TARDIS, there was no chance that either of them could break free of the other. For the first time, he could follow his companion until the very end.

"To grow old with you," River said softly, then chuckled. "I do believe I've killed for less."

The Doctor's lips pursed, because it was true, and then softened again, because it was so sad that it was true.

His mind, as always, pulled back to Clara, the woman who had her own gravity over him. Yes, he remembered. Somehow, despite it all, he had made her happy in that ramshackle Tower, shoved squarely in the dark village of Christmas.

He'd made his Clara happy at last.

And when all was said and done, it was all that mattered. The breaking of his own hearts was nothing in comparison. He felt his head bending between his shoulders as he leaned over the console. The desperation that filled him was quieter, now, his resolve cresting over it.

He lifted his eyes to River Song's. "Can I have just a little more time?" he asked, like a schoolboy who isn't ready to stop playing.

River gazed at him, her own love clear in her eyes. "A little more," she promised.

The breath he hadn't known he was holding rushed out of him. A little more time with Clara, he thought with relief. It wasn't what he wanted. He wanted all of her, her past, present, future, and every version that had ever existed. But he'd already taken nearly all he'd been destined to get.

But just a little more…

He looked at the back of the view-screen, knowing that Clara's smiling face, her lips that he'd kissed thousands of times, and almost a thousand years ago when he'd been a much younger soul indeed, was on the other side, just as her future lay with another side of him. And he would keep his promise to never send her away, to have her hands pressed against his hearts the moment she stopped drawing breath.

Her future in his past, and a planet where nothing and no one could rip them apart from one another, ever again. The Doctor squared his thin shoulders, letting the memories of every day he'd gotten to love Clara Oswald, and keep her all to himself, fill up every particle of his body, every nerve that screamed how much he wanted to keep her _now_.

He glanced over at River, who was watching his every move. "Will I be okay?" he asked and then winced when her eyes sparkled. "Oh, alright, alright. I know."

River smiled, while he grumbled, "Teaching you that word was in my top ten mistakes." He flipped a switch on the console, and River laughed, blowing him a kiss.

"You're the Doctor," she reminded him again. "That's spoiler enough."

The Doctor watched her evaporate, glancing around the empty TARDIS, remembering the day Clara had once pulled a 300 year old Christmas turkey out of the Time Winds.

He sighed and closed his eyes, allowing himself to feel the pain again, before stamping it down into the harder parts of his soul. It wouldn't be the first time he'd gone to Hell for Clara Oswald. And this way, he would at least know she'd have a happy ending.

 _I'd face anything for you, Clara_ , he thought. _Even sending you back to me._

But today was not tomorrow, and today, Clara Oswald was still his. He thought of a planet that was as far away from Trenzalore as could possibly be- one where the sea was yellow and the beaches were made of something that tasted like chocolate. Just a few more dates, a few more stolen glances, looks from her eyes that betrayed that she loved him. Very soon, a different Doctor would be able to tell her he loved her back.

But not yet. Just a little more, enough to keep him going into the long abyss ahead.

 _I'll be the Doctor, just like you wanted_ , he thought, then smiled to himself. _Turns out, you were the boss all along._

He gripped the controls as the TARDIS began to whir, taking him to Clara, who was still his today, knowing she had no idea that he would be hers always.

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\- THE END-


End file.
